Grizzlies and caribou and wolves, oh my! Savoring Denali’s delights.

A while back, our friends K.C. and Scott got the word that they’d won the Denali Road Lottery, which meant they could drive their personal vehicle into Denali National Park and Preserve for one day after the regular season ended. Would we like to come along? Oh. We would.

Ours has been a long, good friendship. Forty years ago they were our neighbors in the city, with three cats and a dog. Then they moved to a country farm with half an arkful of animals, and later to Alaska where the menagerie takes care of itself.

Which brings us to Denali.

Denali is huge. It’s the tallest mountain, from base to summit, in the world. (Everest is taller only because its base starts at a much higher elevation.) I did not have an image in my head of the road into Denali. I rather thought it might wind around and around and terminate fairly high up the mountain, which is what mountain roads in Oregon do. Because the thing is over 20,000 feet high, I worried that we’d end up all woozy and in danger of being trampled by caribou. But then again it would have been worth it to see the caribou. I’ve seen moose and grizzly bears, but the caribou would be a “life mammal,” that is, new to me. I’d never laid eyes on a Dall sheep or a wolf, either.

As it turns out, the road into Denali does not climb Denali, or protrude into Denali, or scatter humans all over Denali. It’s a 92-mile narrow, dusty ribbon that does its best to not ruin the place. We’re the intruders here, but the road instructs us to stay well back, peasants attending royalty.

We got an early start and motored to the park entrance in the dark. Right away a few “life ptarmigans” were spotted apparently, but I don’t like to count skitterings on the shoulder that I have to take someone else’s word for. Still, it was auspicious, and the road purled out ahead of us for miles, all prospect and promise, like the beginning of a long, good friendship.

The dawn light was sly on the shoulders of the mountains and then spilled color into the valleys. Not just color: All the colors. Every color you ever needed. The whole box.

Dall sheep showed up against a dun mountainside. Grizzly bears revealed themselves to good binoculars and loped effortlessly over enough acreage to make it clear that binocular distance is best. Wolves eluded us, but wolf territory sprawled for miles in the braided river valleys, and the possibility of wolf turns out to be so similar to the reality of wolf that I was hardly bereft.

A moose grunted irritably across the road, with two admirers in tentative pursuit. Adolescents they were, their antlers the moose equivalent of a boy’s first mustache, and now and then they scraped their heads at each other halfheartedly, wondering if they were doing it right. Likely not. The cow was not visibly impressed.

But then, there, toward dusk, unmistakable, was my caribou. Not the caribou I had anticipated; I’ve seen the pictures, and so I know caribou are supposed to arrange themselves in a long picturesque string on the tundra against a snowy backdrop. The one in front is supposed to fling his antlers back in a splendid yet saucy posture, with the rest trailing behind in admiration.

This was just the one guy, but he would have been the one in front. I’ve seen ungulates before. Deer and elk and moose and what-have-you. But this one took the cake in ungulation. If you can maintain that much majesty on nothing but lichens and tundra scuzz, you’ve got nothing left to prove. If I’d seen a whole string of them, I might never have come to, and that’s a fact.

Wildlife sightings are thrilling. But it’s the realm of possibility that floats the heart: wolf and caribou and bear and moose and marmot and pika possibility. It’s the gratitude and humility that comes with a glimpse of how the world was and how it should be, a world in which we are clever, vulnerable, insignificant creatures of the margins. And beyond any individual miracle of an animal that might cross our path, it is the vastness and the perfection and the beauty of their rightful home that I want to gather with my eyes and decant into my soul, to sip from for the rest of my life.